Stanley "Mouse" Miller begins a new project at his Sebastopol, Calif. studio Tuesday June 23, 2015. Artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller is one of the most famous poster artists of the San Francisco rock era. He is out with a new art book and a 50th anniversary gallery show. less

Stanley "Mouse" Miller begins a new project at his Sebastopol, Calif. studio Tuesday June 23, 2015. Artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller is one of the most famous poster artists of the San Francisco rock era. He is ... more

Stanley "Mouse" Miller poses in front of his famous Avalon ballroom poster from 1966 in his Sebastopol, Calif. studio. Artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller is one of the most famous poster artists of the San Francisco rock era. He is out with a new art book and a 50th anniversary gallery show. less

Stanley "Mouse" Miller poses in front of his famous Avalon ballroom poster from 1966 in his Sebastopol, Calif. studio. Artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller is one of the most famous poster artists of the San Francisco ... more

Tools of the trade, artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller holds some of his well used brushes at his Sebastopol, Calif. studio. Artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller is one of the most famous poster artists of the San Francisco rock era. He is out with a new art book and a 50th anniversary gallery show. less

Tools of the trade, artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller holds some of his well used brushes at his Sebastopol, Calif. studio. Artist Stanley "Mouse" Miller is one of the most famous poster artists of the San ... more

The first time artist Stanley “Mouse” Miller and drawing partner Alton Kelley were hired to do a concert poster for the Grateful Dead, they spelled the name wrong.

They’d never heard of the band, so when they got a second chance, they tried just a little bit harder, creating a bleached skeleton wearing a crown of red roses to reference the name Grateful (not “Greatful”) Dead.

“Kind of life and death together,” says Mouse, who had always liked to draw skeletons. “I colored it in and did the lettering, and it changed art history.”

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Within weeks the skeleton (or skull) and roses poster had made its way across the country and beyond, on its way to becoming one of the most widely recognizable logos in rock iconography. It might be second only to the Rolling Stones’ tongue-and-lip logo, but this summer, the skull and roses comes first, as the Grateful Dead’s farewell tour heads from California to Chicago, where the long, strange trip will end for good.

“Celebrating 50 Years of the Art of Stanley Mouse” will open Wednesday, and he is busy completing a fresh canvas of that original “skeleton and roses” poster to go with a new interpretation of it for its 50th anniversary in 2016. He’s also painted a tribute to the band’s “Fare Thee Well” shows.

Mouse was once such an integral part of the Dead family that they gave him studio space in their house on Ashbury Street and later offered to pay for his liver transplant. But he is not attending any of the historic farewell shows.

“I have a hard time going to concerts,” says Mouse, 74. “I have a hard time going down the street.” It is about all he can muster to get from his home in Sebastopol to his studio 10 minutes away, hidden at the back of a warehouse complex.

A stenciled sign in the glass door reads “Mouseum,” and there is a living artifact inside, pulling his paint and brushes from canvas to canvas in a little red wagon. He is not particularly mouse-like in looks or mannerisms, and that’s not how he got the nickname. His father was a California artist who worked on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” After the family moved to Detroit, the Disney story followed, and in the seventh grade, Stanley became “Mouse” — then and ever after.

Formally he calls himself Stanley Mouse, but never Stan and never Miller. “Mouse!” became both his signature and a character in his drawings. He’d used it at car shows across the country, airbrushing bulging eyeball illustrations on tens of thousands of T-shirts and sweatshirts.

“My hand was like an Olympic athlete’s,” he says, “but I was doing hot rod monsters and thinking there must be something new. My mind was going crazy trying to think of something new, and then psychedelics came into the picture, and there was like an exodus from Detroit to San Francisco.”

Mouse joined that exodus in Mouse-style, after beating the draft. He came west in a brand-new hearse that he was assigned to deliver. His destination was the Trips Festival, largest of the acid tests, and he parked in front of Longshoremen’s Hall on the waterfront.

But he had not slept in three days, and the back of that hearse was so inviting that he crawled back there for a short nap. He ended up sleeping through the show.

That was the last event in the psychedelic Camelot that Mouse would miss. It was January 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, and the whole scene unspooled before him as he transitioned from drawing hot rods to drawing posters for the rock dances, as they were then called, at the Avalon Ballroom, an upstairs room off Van Ness that would later become the Regency movie theater.

His partner Kelley was an artist/mechanic whom Mouse had hired to fix his ’65 Porsche. By the time it was running, they’d formed Mouse Studios. Kelley was an idea man, and Mouse did the drawing and lettering. Their first poster was a knockoff of the reefer-toking Zig-Zag man for a double bill of Big Brother & the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

They didn’t mind cribbing ideas, and they got the inspiration for the famed Dead poster from a 19th century drawing they found in the public library.

The show was Sept. 16 and 17 at the Avalon Ballroom. Mouse doesn’t know how many posters were printed, maybe 1,000.

“Within weeks it made it to museums all over the world,” he says. “I heard it was in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.”

‘The scene was just crazy’

Promoter Chet Helms, who put on the dances at Avalon under the name Family Dog, paid $100 per poster, and that made Mouse’s rent, in an old firehouse from the horse-drawn era, on 17th Street. Mouse and Kelley worked for Bill Graham, too, but he paid only $75 for a poster at the Fillmore.

“Every day was like a month, with so much stuff happening,” Mouse says. “The scene was just crazy. Wild.”

Mouse’s girlfriend, who’d made the drive from Detroit in the hearse, gave him an ultimatum — either move to the country with her or stay and make posters with Kelley. When he gave her his answer, she threw his ink bottle across the room and left.

“We were just doing posters for dance halls,” he says. “It seemed not important but the most important thing in the world at the same time. The whole scene was so important.”

Then it collapsed under the weight of all that importance. Mouse could have used that hearse when they staged a mock funeral procession up Haight Street and buried the concept of the hippie. That was the end of the Summer of Love.

“This wonderful, colorful scene just kind of died,” says Mouse, who left when Eric Clapton summoned him to put some flames on his Rolls-Royce in London. Clapton had totaled the Rolls by the time Mouse got there, but there was other work.

He fell in with the Beatles, and it took a job doing signs for Woodstock to get him back to the States.

Back in San Francisco, Mouse Studios did album covers for “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” both released in 1970.

Mouse moved to San Rafael and started a T-shirt business. He lost interest in the Dead after vocalist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan died in 1973 and they stopped singing the blues.

Mouse/Kelley did not draw the “steal your face” logo that appeared on the Dead’s 1974 live album, but they did draw album covers for “Mars Hotel” (1974) and “Terrapin Station” (1978), along with covers for Journey, Steve Miller and so on.

Kelley died in 2008, and Mouse Studios kept moving north and west, Petaluma to Sonoma to Sebastopol. Along the way, Mouse’s liver failed him bad.

“I had no insurance, so they were going to let me dry out,” he says. “Finally the Grateful Dead said they were going to buy me a new liver. When they said that, the doctors found me a new liver. But Sonoma County ended up paying for it.”

In recovery, Mouse moved to a 28-acre apple orchard owned by a friend. He still does labels for commercial clients and the occasional album cover. Recently he did one of Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia in a rowboat.

Lively descriptions

He still does hot rod stuff, too, and he hires models to sit for figurative portraits. All of it is represented in “California Dreams,” accompanied by lively text by one of the master chroniclers of the Dead and its ancillary culture, Blair Jackson. Published by Soft Skull Press, the book costs $50, but it will be given to anybody who buys a painting or drawing at the Art Exchange. Poster-size prints are available at www.mousestudios.com.

The “Zig-Zag Man” painting will be on display, but “skeleton and roses” won’t. Asked who owns it, Mouse goes quiet. “I don’t know what to say about that,” he finally says after a long silence. Then he looks to his daughter and office manager, Sarah Miller, for an answer.

“It’s in a private collection,” she says, and Mouse lets it go at that.

“Celebrating 50 Years of the Art of Stanley Mouse” will run Wednesday to Aug. 8 at the San Francisco Art Exchange, 458 Geary St. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday-Saturday. (415) 441-8840, www.sfae.com.